Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)

4. Towns in Slovakia after 1993

Administration as a means of organizing the town network

It is typical of Bratislava even today that, unlike the capital cities of other countries, it does not exert any special political influence on the country. It was not only the votes cast in rural areas that contributed to Mečiar’s victory (three times, between 1990 and 1998), but also the decisive manner of civil organizations in rural areas and their organized campaign that raised the opposition to power in rural centres in 1998. The same is true of the government change in 2006. Owing to the high number of nationalistic and left-wing voters in the country, the populist and nationalist left-wing Robert Fico, the former mayor of Žilina and the president of Smer (Direction - Social Democratic Party, which refers to the third way between the political left and right wings), was able to establish a cabinet with the Slovak National Party, Jan Slota’s ultranationalist party.

After the establishment of the new state in 1918, it was the aim of the town policy to mark out the new administrative centres. We called this process ‘conquest’ above.

The first decisive step to state independence was to set up the 16 counties from the eight complete and twelve fragmentary counties, which happened in 1920. The six large counties formed in 1923 already indicated that the new power was seeking centralization, because in this way they could create a means of homogenization and Czechoslovakization. With the provincial system created in 1928, the eastern part of contemporary Czechoslovakia, i.e. the Slovak province, was converted into a subordinated part of the country. It was the task of this region to serve the Czech section of the country, even at the expense of sacrificing its factories. The eastern region supplied the western, more highly developed region with raw materials and it also became a market for the goods produced in the western section. The ethnic goals of regionalization were gradually completed with economic regionalization, which was also expressed in the administrative divisions (and, of course, operational regulations, laws and decrees).

The administration between 1939 and 1945 was an important period in Slovak history, because it was at that time that the first independent Slovak state was established. The division into six counties served the interests of those employed in administration, i.e. those of the Slovak middle classes, because in this way many loyal Slovak people could obtain genteel office jobs with regular salaries. Apart from the Slovakization of the administration and ethnic regionalization, the independent state, which was very important from the point of view of

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